This piece originally posted at brainspank.org 9/9/10
America has become her own sin.
Two wars. One for no reason at all and another who’s reason is lost.
The richest country in the world can’t pay for itself, but she she can still afford to send her children to die and kill.
While her people can’t find work.
There are five people hoping for every job available.
I know a woman who’s childhood friend is days or hours from dying. Cancer. She has two sons in college and no father. She tells me she can’t afford to pay attention. I get it. But she is it. It’s not me. It’s her. She is gorgeous. She’s tough, but she doesn’t know who or what the speaker of the house is. She should, but she doesn’t care. She’s not at all concerned that a dickhead like Boehner might be in charge and how that will impact her life and her ability to keep her boys in school as well as maybe her own health insurance.
She is it though. It’s not just the youth vote, it’s the vanishing middle class. If they don’t engage, it’s all over but the shouting.
Life can be bullshit but that doesn’t stop a single one of us. Humans never stop pushing and pulling. We can’t help it. Men are dicks and women are bitches. We are all so foul. Dirty. polluted. Infected.
The disconnect widens and deepens because regular Americans believe they have no hope of making a difference.
It’s hard to blame them.
Ask yourself what you want. Think about what happens if you get it. If you win, who loses?
Say for example you get a high paying job with a military industrial contractor. You feed your kids. Your wife drives a Volvo and you speed around in an Audi. The Mexican gardeners get paid. Your parents are proud. At the end of the day, you kill brown people for a living. People like you. People just like you. Your neighbors and business associates share their holidays and their children’s birthday parties with you.
Or, you drive a beat to shit Honda and people like you. People just like you. You have parties at your house with a cake from Costco and you get your prescriptions from Walmart. You hate that redneck Republican in the next cubicle but he’s a nice guy and he makes one helluva bean dip.
Where are we? Who are we and what have we become?
The worst of us host events where the Koran will be burned. The worst among us seek to prevent a community center being built on private property in the city of New York despite the obvious provisions and express intent of the very first and arguably most important amendment to our constitution. The same idiots think our president is some secret Muslim Socialist out to destroy America. The willfully ignorant and the chronic, untreatable and stupid. I cannot begin to describe how I loathe such people. My disgust is profound and complete.
My disdain robs me of my own breath. If you’re reading this and you merely flirt with any of these concepts, fuck you in the neck.
I understand that America has it’s life to live. I get that you need to get through the day. I understand that most you have children and families. But you still are the most privileged, spoiled people on the planet. Black or white, brown or callow. Maybe we don’t deserve our largess. So be it. Keep tolerating this shit. Maintain that straight face. Look away. Let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while the middle class evaporates into the ether. By the time you cannot possibly afford tuition for your kids, by the time you get cancer from the chemical company dumping glowing shit in your water supply because of deregulation, by the time you can barely drive a road or over a bridge in your fossil fueled car because of it’s egregious disrepair, by that time it will be too goddamn late.
Your earth will be too hot, you government will only pay for the wealthy to be protected from you because you want to storm their gates while your gums bleed and your teeth are loosening in their sockets and your pockets are full of BBQ sauce.
That time is today. We are here. It is now. Or vote Republican.............
Drinks for my friends.